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Wondering how my 64gb will outlast every other part upgrade my gaming Linux box will get over the years
Your use case is obviously different, but I've gone years between system upgrades. I mostly do OSS coding, or work stuff; not gaming. The only case I can imagine needing to upgrade my little Ryzen with 16 cores - a laptop CPU - is if it becomes absolutely imperative that I run AI models on my desktop. Or if Rust really does become pervasive; compiling Rust programs is almost as bad as compiling Haskell, and will take over my computer for minutes at a time.
When I got this little micro, the first thing I did was upgrade it to 64GB of RAM, because that's the one thing I think you can never have too much of; especially with the modern web and all the shit that brings with it; Electron apps, and so on, absolutely chew up memory. The one good thing about the Rust trend is better memory use, so the crappy compile times are somewhat forgiveable.
Somewhere around 2017 I bought an old dell precision from 2011 for $25, put a radeon rx 570 in it a few years later and used it as my main computer until last year when I finally got around to building a replacement
My case was purely, that I had upgraded the gpu in my classic Mac Pro, and thought that a SFX pc build could be done with the old gpu and a power supply and mobo. It started out with a cheap mobo, to hold only an old i7 from an imac that was parted out, and 8gb of ram (2x4 sticks I had spare) and the vega56. I found it so capable a system, that the only issue was ram when I forgot about the dozen tabs open on a browser, and the game just launched would hang the system. Before I would ‘waste’ spending money on the max 16gb that this board could hold, I started collecting the parts for it’s current setup; a520i, ryzen5 5600x , 64gb, nvme ssd and the gpus I’ve now swapped between the cMP so now it’s a rx5700xt. Use is purely a spare, don’t want a windows machine, I’ve got the mac for a server/media machine, so it’s all purpose and games on the Linux box. Although I have got dual boot capability set up on both just because I could, maybe something really offside would need w10 - one example; VCDS car diagnostic software that doesn’t support anything but win.
I used to run VM's in parallel for my job, which eat RAM like candy. Other than that though, I've never had a use case for more than 32GB RAM.
700 tabs + VM?
At work I regularly kiss 32gb with everything open and a VM. When I got my latest machine I made sure to get 64 so I think I'll be good for a while. 32 gigs lasted me from 2017 to 2024. And if I need more this machine takes 2 SODIMMS so I can install at least 96 gigs.
Fixing a SSAO bug where indices overflowed the 32bit int on the gpu I had to use 64GB. Since then I have never needed more than 32GB and at home 24 is way more than I need.
Well, I just remembered, actually I did need more once for a fftv bug (same story, 32bit overflow) but I borrowed a 192GB pc for that.